News: Invited Talk by Neelakantan Krishnaswami! New deadline: June 20th.

ML is a very large family of programming languages that includes Standard ML,
OCaml, F#, SML#, Manticore, MetaOCaml, JoCaml, Alice ML, Dependent ML, Flow
Caml, and many others. All ML languages share several fundamental traits,
besides a good deal of syntax. They are higher-order, strict, mostly pure,
and typed, with algebraic and other data types. Their type systems are
derived from Hindley-Milner. The development of these languages has inspired
a significant body of computer science research and influenced the design of
many other programming languages, including Haskell, Scala and Clojure, Rust,
ATS and many others.

ML workshops have been held in affiliation with ICFP continuously since 2005.
This workshop specifically aims to recognise the entire extended ML family and
to provide a forum for presenting and discussing common issues, both practical
(compilation techniques, implementations of concurrency and parallelism,
programming for the Web) and theoretical (fancy types, module systems,
metaprogramming). The scope of the workshop includes all aspects of the
design, semantics, theory, application, implementation, and teaching of the
members of the ML family. We also encourage presentations from related
languages (such as Scala, Rust, Nemerle, ATS, etc.), to exchange experience of
further developing ML ideas.

The ML family workshop will be held in close coordination with the OCaml Users
and Developers Workshop.

Scope

We acknowledge the whole breadth of the ML family and aim to include languages
that are closely related (although not by blood), such as Rust, ATS, Scala,
and Typed Clojure. Those languages have implemented and investigated run-time
and type system choices that may be worth considering for OCaml, F# and other
ML languages. We also hope that the exposure to the state of the art ML might
favourably influence those related languages. Specifically, we seek research
presentations on topics including (but not limited to)

Four kinds of submissions will be accepted: Research Presentations, Experience
Reports, Demos and Informed Positions.

Research Presentations: Research presentations should describe new ideas,
experimental results, or significant advances in ML-related projects. We
especially encourage presentations that describe work in progress, that
outline a future research agenda, or that encourage lively discussion.
These presentations should be structured in a way which can be, at least
in part, of interest to (advanced) users.

Experience Reports: Users are invited to submit Experience Reports about
their use of ML and related languages. These presentations do not need to
contain original research but they should tell an interesting story to
researchers or other advanced users, such as an innovative or unexpected
use of advanced features or a description of the challenges they are
facing or attempting to solve.

Demos: Live demonstrations or short tutorials should show new
developments, interesting prototypes, or work in progress, in the form of
tools, libraries, or applications built on or related to ML and related
languages. (You will need to provide all the hardware and software
required for your demo; the workshop organisers are only able to provide a
projector.)

Informed Positions: A justified argument for or against a language
feature. The argument must be substantiated, either theoretically (e.g.
by a demonstration of (un)soundness, an inference algorithm, a complexity
analysis), empirically or by substantial experience. Personal experience
is accepted as justification so long as it is extensive and illustrated
with concrete examples.

Format

The ML 2016 workshop will continue the informal approach used since 2010.
Presentations are selected from submitted abstracts. There are no published
proceedings, so contributions may be submitted for publication elsewhere. We
hope that this format will encourage the presentation of exciting (if
unpolished) research and deliver a lively workshop atmosphere.

Each presentation should take 20-25 minutes, except demos, which should take
10-15 minutes. The exact time will be decided based on the number of accepted
submissions. The presentations will likely be recorded.

Post-proceedings

ML 2016 is an informal workshop without proceedings. We are planning to
publish a post-proceedings and to invite interested authors of selected
presentations to expand their abstracts for inclusion.

Coordination with the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop

The OCaml workshop is seen as more practical and is dedicated in significant
part to OCaml community building and the development of the OCaml system. In
contrast, the ML family workshop is not focused on any language in particular,
is more research-oriented, and deals with general issues of ML-style
programming and type systems. Yet there is an overlap, which we are keen to
explore in various ways. The authors who feel their submission fits both
workshops are encouraged to mention it at submission time or contact the
Program Chairs.

Submission details

Submissions should be at most two pages, in PDF format, and printable on US
Letter or A4 sized paper. A submission should have a synopsis (2-3 lines) and
a body between 1 and 2 pages, in one- or two-column layout. The synopsis
should be suitable for inclusion in the workshop program.

Submissions must be uploaded to the
workshop submission website
before the submission deadline (Friday 10thMonday 20th June, 2016). If you have a question
concerning the scope of the workshop or the submission process, please
contact the program chair.